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Radeon HD 5000 Series Gallium3D Performance vs. Catalyst

Phoronix: Radeon HD 5000 Series Gallium3D Performance vs. Catalyst

Earlier this week I delivered results showing the AMD Radeon HD 6000 open-source driver becoming more competitive against the proprietary AMD Catalyst driver. The Gallium3D driver is still far from reigning supreme in most aspects that concern desktop Linux users, but much progress has been made in recent months. For those HD 5000 series graphics card owners, here are similar open-source driver vs. AMD Catalyst OpenGL Linux performance tests.

That is: with no 3D bugs and with the chance to use kwin_gles instead of kwin, boosting enormously CPU idle times. Can you make a battery life comparison? I think Catalyst may have an edge still, but not a significant one.

Comercial Games?

It's nice to see how close the performance is betwixt the Open Source Drivers and the Close Source drivers with Open Source games, but it would be also nice to see more Comercially available games being compared like L4D2, or Metro Last Light (when it comes out for linux). now understandably most of us using older video cards maybe dont play that much anymore or we play older games, like Doom 3 that would also be a nice addition to the Bench table.

I know that the mentality is that we all should be able to reproduce the results on our machines using Phoronix Benchmark hence why there might not be comercial games support for it, but I trust in your results, and from time to time it would be nice to see these games being benched

On my system (AMD E-450, Fedora 19 with updates, r600g stock, kernel 3.11rc6 with DPM and SB shaders), Bastion and Half Life 1 run beautifully, and also Superbrothers Sword & Sorcery. DotA hangs, but was unplayable in Windows anyway, so, it doesn't matter.